There’s no part of the Internet more competitive or subject to ridiculous nerd-fights than search, if by “competitive” you mean “sewn up by an aggressive corporation that completely dominates the market.” But Microsoft can’t pretend Google doesn’t exist or that search isn’t important, so they rolled out Bing…which we’re sure people use almost as much as Yahoo!, and…wait, they shut down AltaVista.
Anyway, Bing has to compete, so they decided to resort to good, old-fashioned American techniques, namely stealing. Bing’s been busted copying Google’s search results. How’d they do it?
By looking up the results Google offers up when you misspell a word, and copying them, using Internet Explorer with Bing search bar enabled. Then when you misspell words on Bing, it offers up Google’s search results. Google proved it by creating dummy searches that returned no results, putting a page manually at the top…and then watched Bing copy them precisely, by using code in Internet Explorer to see what results the dummy searches returned.
Yes, Microsoft is using Big Brother tactics to essentially cheat on the bonus questions on a pop quiz. They don’t even deny they’re doing it. It’s nice to see that Microsoft, despite not being the dominant software company for years, hasn’t gotten any less evil or arrogant. Way to not let failure change you, guys.
Meanwhile, if you’re using IE…what the heck is wrong with you? Get a real browser!
[ via the nerd fight referees at Gizmodo ]